“Marsh was a tireless advocate and activist for civil rights, rights for workers, worker-owned cooperatives, and social justice,” said John Davenport, Ph.D., a former director of Fordham’s Peace and Justice Studies program, which Marsh helped found. Davenport noted that Marsh was known for his defense of “critical modernism”—a form of critical theory that addresses postmodernist arguments by philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Paul-Michel Foucault.

Born in Polson, Montana, Marsh earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. He entered the Jesuit community there but left the order to pursue a Ph.D. at Northwestern University, which he earned in 1971.

From 1970 to 1985, he taught philosophy at St. Louis University. In 1980, he spent a year at Fordham as a visiting professor; five years later, he joined Fordham’s philosophy department full time. On his 20th anniversary in 2005, he was lauded with a Bene Merenti Medal, and was cited for thought that “fuses Marxist critical theory, phenomenology, process metaphysics and transcendental Thomism in critically constructive ways that counter the canon of modern secularism while issuing a sustained, sophisticated argument for social justice.” A year later, he retired from Fordham, his nephew T.J. Campbell said, and was named professor emeritus.

Over the course of his career, Marsh authored and co-edited nine books, including Post-Cartesian Meditations, (Fordham University Press, 1988); Critique, Action and Liberation (SUNY Press, 1994); Process, Praxis, and Transcendence (SUNY Press, 1999), and Unjust Legality: A Critique of Habermas’s Philosophy of Law, (Rowan and Littlefield, 2001). He was involved in numerous professional associations such as the American Catholic Philosophical Association, for which he served as president from 2004 to 2005.

Davenport said that when Marsh joined the Fordham philosophy faculty, he was part of a new generation of lay philosophers, along with Dominic Balestra, Ph.D., and Merold Westphal, Ph.D., to join what had been a department made up primarily of Jesuits.

“Marsh was seen as a new kind of thinker in the critical thinking tradition, but someone who respected transcendental Thomism, and therefore fit with into the department,” he said.

“What he called critical modernism was his own development of critical theory, which is a tradition of thought that goes back to the Frankfurt School in Germany just after World War II. It attempts to find new ways defending universal or objective standards.”

Davenport, who was on the faculty with Marsh from 1998 to 2006, said Marsh’s critiques of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas had a big influence on him and his colleagues. A child of the Civil Rights era who was influenced by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Marsh was more open to theological themes and inspirations than Habermas. Marsh’s gift, said Davenport, was that he wielded those themes in ways that even non-believers could appreciate. He was also unfailingly polite to those who disagreed with him, he said.

“I think it’s fair to say he was a Marxist,” he said. “He wasn’t an activist professor though. I heard him say on more than one occasion that it was very important that students of all political persuasion felt free to debate openly. He really bent over backward to accommodate students of different political persuasions.”

Robin Andersen, Ph.D., a professor emerita of communications and former head of Peace and Justice Studies, hosted both Marsh and Berrigan for dinners at her home in New Rochelle. Because neither of them drove, she and her husband, Fordham lecturer of biology Guy Robinson, Ph.D., often found themselves in discussions with them on drives back to Manhattan.

“He was very committed in the classroom and the way that he would integrate his pedagogy in his teaching with the philosophy of aligning yourself to the poor. He would give the students a theoretical and analytical perspective about inequalities and global injustices, imbued with a philosophy about the nature of human lives, and how we all need to live with dignity,” she said.

Marsh was a dedicated pacifist and used The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Fordham University Press, 2004), in his classes. The book, which details Berrigan’s trial for civil disobedience at the height of the Vietnam War, features afterward by Marsh and Andersen.

Andersen said she’ll miss Marsh’s thoughtfulness and the ease with which he engaged in conversation.

“Some very thoughtful people can be kind of intense, and Jim didn’t have that intensity about him,” she said.

“Both Dan [Berrigan] and Jim were very much into creating community around them. They had a real commitment to bringing young people into a world that is not easy to find in our culture, one filled with thought, compassion, and deep contemplation about what we’re doing in our fast-paced professional world,” she said.

Campbell said that he and his sister Elizabeth Campbell, Ph.D., benefited tremendously from time spent with their uncle, especially through holiday visits to Colorado, where Elizabeth lives and teaches at the University of Denver. Their education began with books on artists he bought them when they were children and continued through the years.

“Jim had an enormous influence on Elizabeth and me from a young age, particularly in terms of our appreciation for modern art and dance and theater,” he said noting that he exposed them to Twyla Tharp’s In The Upper Room, which combined several forms of art, including music by Philip Glass, one of Marsh’s favorite musicians.

Marsh was a devoted fan of the UConn women’s basketball team and subscribed to the Hartford Courant newspaper so he could keep up with them, Campbell said. He also devoted two hours a day to centering prayer, a form of meditation where one focuses on a single word such as light or love.

During one of their last visits to Colorado for Thanksgiving, Campbell said that Marsh confided to him that being a bachelor was also an important part of his identity. Despite a penchant for living alone, Marsh nonetheless drew others to him, he said, with a keen intellect, deep insights into modern culture, and a big booming baritone voice.

“His students loved him, and his friends and colleagues loved him as well. When we were at museums, he would comment on a painting, and people gathered around to listen to his commentary like he was a docent,” he said.

“He was so knowledgeable about the artists and how the paintings were constructed, that people would follow along with us.”

In addition to T.J. and Elizabeth Campbell, Marsh is survived by his sister Mary Ann Courtney and grand-nephews Ryan and Grant Karlsgodt. A funeral Mass will be held for him at St. Francis Xavier Church, 46 W. 16th Street, on Friday, Sep. 24, at 10:30 a.m. All are welcome.

Robin Andersen, Ph.D., a professor of communication and media studies, hopes to show how, with Media, Central American Refugees, and the U.S. Border Crisis: Security Discourses, Immigrant Demonization, and the Perpetuation of Violence (Routledge, 2019).

The key to understanding anti-immigration rhetoric in blaring headlines and incendiary tweets about an “invasion” of migrants illegally entering the United States from Mexico, she said, is to recognize the language as a “security discourse.”

The narrative starts with a “security” concern, which recently has been the southern border. It asks,What is causing this dire, fearful danger? Immigrants. When news starts from the position of fear of invasion, it must be assumed that those arriving at the border are inherently criminal; they are, after all, invaders, she said. “When news demonizes people who are refugees, they become the enemy; they become othered.”

The next logical step in this media framework is to focus on what security forces are doing to stop them, she said. We look to authority, in this case, the military, for protection.

“The way you open the story and start to talk about it dictates the way the story is going to be narrated in the press,” she said.

“Then we’re going to hear about the soldiers going down and putting up concertina wire and beefing up the border with more weaponry.”

Andersen noted that this is not a new phenomenon. In a 1983 television address, Ronald Reagan warned that unless a tough stand was taken against communism in Nicaragua, a “tidal wave” of “feetpeople” would be “swarming our country.” But a better way to tell the story, she said, is through a humanitarian discourse.

“If you turned the narrative around and started by asking, ‘What’s making it impossible for the people of these countries to stay there, prosper, to make a life for themselves? Why are they being murdered?’ Those questions would lead to a very a different narrative, and a very different news story,” she said.

“What is happening in the countries of Central America? What’s been the U.S. role there? After all, the U.S. has been policing the hemisphere for years. So, let’s take a look at what we’ve actually been doing.”

Andersen, who visited El Salvador as a graduate student in 1979, details in the book multiple instances over the last three decades in which she says the United States contributed to the instability of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, the so-called “Northern Triangle” of Central America.

To understand how the security discourse was embraced and repeated by major media outlets, Andersen, who co-wrote the book with Adrian Bergmann, a research fellow at the University of El Salvador, said one need look no further than the ominous warnings of an “invasion” that President Trump repeated about a caravan of immigrants making its way toward the U.S. in the months before the 2018 midterm elections.

What finally “shook the media frame,” she said, was the image of Honduran mother Maria Meza grabbing the arms of her 5-year-old twin daughters Cheili and Saira as they frantically ran from a tear gas canister spewing fumes on the Mexican side of the border wall. When it was published in November, Andersen said, news organizations began quoting from humanitarian aid and human rights organizations. Those perspectives are inherently different from security frames. Our concern was drawn to preserving life and dignity, she said, and we felt compelled to embrace those who have been persecuted in their own countries.

“We rarely discuss the ways in which our culture and our economics have been influenced by military discourse and military practices. We’ve lost a language of diplomacy and negotiation,” Andersen said.

What would a narrative that embraced a humanitarian discourse truly look like? Andersen said it would acknowledge messy truths such as those revealed in Dana Frank’s  The Long Honduran Night Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup (Haymarket Books 2018), which she cites in the book.

“We basically helped the military in Honduras depose a popularly elected president in 2009, Manuel Zelaya. That led to the complete destruction of the rule of law in Honduras. The cascading effect since then is that now it’s a dictatorship, and one of the most dangerous countries on earth,” Andersen said.

Today, she said, the exodus is being driven in part by the countries’ own leaders. Whereas urban violence is forcing many in Honduras to flee, she said, in Guatemala, indigenous people are being evicted from their lands by national security forces loyal to elites.

Multinational corporations controlled by those same elites are then moving in to exploit natural resources such as palm oil, biofuels, timber, and sugar cane, she said, adding that any story that addresses migration should also address environmental degradation and the extreme risks faced by those who resist.

Andersen expresses frustration with the Democratic party as well, which she said hasn’t mounted an informed, critical perspective in response to the president.

Instead of challenging the need for more border security, she said, what they say is, “a wall isn’t the best way to secure the border.” What they should be asking is, “What can we do to stop the dismantling of these countries, to stop the forced out-migration of refugees?’” she said.

How the world receives its information about such crises is a central concern of contemporary humanitarianism. At a lively book launch held at the United Nations bookshop in New York on Dec. 7, Robin Andersen, Ph.D., professor of communication and media studies, celebrated the publication of The Routledge Companion to Media and Humanitarian Action (Routledge, 2017) co-edited by Andersen with Purnaka L. de Silva.

Andersen said her book presents a comprehensive analysis of how mass media portrays humanitarian crises, and a call for a renewed “ability to perpetuate a humanitarian imagination” through “the ethics of solidarity.”

Andersen and de Silva were joined at the launch by U.N. Undersecretary-General Adama Dieng, who spoke about the importance of mass media in a world that has seen a rise in xenophobic nationalism and violence towards immigrants and refugees.

According to Andersen, media holds immense power over the narratives of humanitarianism; it has the ability “to shape how we view victims of disaster, whether worthy or unworthy, innocent or guilty.” Part of the new book’s specific mandate, said Andersen, was to “help ensure that everyone, victims included, has a seat at the table when discussing humanitarian policy,” and that the dispossessed and the displaced “are represented in their full humanity.”

“There is a need to highlight peace journalism,” Andersen says, “which does not enter into our media frameworks very well, since belligerencies grab headlines.” With better media practices, “refugees fleeing war-torn countries could be viewed as like us, and brought into our communities.”

The need for better models of how media covers humanitarian crises has never been more obvious, she said. The election of Donald J. Trump has come with “a narrative that challenges the basic assumptions of the humanitarian imagination” and denies the “affirmation that when confronted by the representations of the suffering of those in need, we are compelled to act in solidarity with them.”

With 61 contributors writing on topics ranging from “Compassion as a News Value” to “Global Activism on Facebook,” Andersen said the Companion will serve as the essential reference resource for professionals both working in the field and setting policy. The book’s essays come from an internationally diverse body of contributors that includes journalists, administrators of NGOs, academics, researchers, and physicians from all over the world.

Andersen’s previous book, book A Century of Media: A Century of War (Peter Lang, 2006) won the 2007 Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award, the honor society of Jesuit colleges and universities. she helped develop the curriculum for Fordham’s Master’s Program on International Humanitarian Action.

The book launch and discussion was live-streamed on the U.N. Facebook page.

— Michael Lindgren

Related article: Professor Decries Media’s Role in Making War into Entertainment

Father Berrigan, Fordham’s poet-in-residence since 2000, died at the Jesuit residence Murray-Weigel Hall on April 30 at age 94. He was an accomplished poet and co-founder, along with his brother Philip, of the Plowshares Movement, an anti-nuclear and Christian pacifist group.

“Dan Berrigan was a giant among us. Whatever one makes of his methods, his lifelong pursuit of peace and justice was both heartfelt and critically important,” said Joseph M. McShane, SJ, president of Fordham.

“He belongs not just to the Jesuits, but to a significant period in American history. His activism came from a poet’s heart—and indeed he was always a highly accomplished poet, a poet who drew his inspiration from the Prophets and the Gospel. His fluency never failed him, and we were blessed to have him for so long as Fordham’s poet-in-residence.”

The Plowshares group was active throughout the 1960s and 70s, and gained notoriety in 1968 when the Berrigans and seven others used homemade napalm to burn draft files in the parking lot of a U.S. Selective Service Office in Catonsville, Maryland, in protest of the Vietnam War. Father Berrigan was convicted of destroying government property and received a three-year sentence in federal prison.

In 1980, the Berrigans and six others broke into a General Electric nuclear facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, damaged nuclear warhead nose cones, and poured blood on documents in the facility. Their arrest and the legal battles that followed were chronicled in the 1982 film In The King of Prussia.

From 1970 to 1995, Father Berrigan spent an estimated seven years in prison for his peace activism, which included protests against the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In June 2012, he lent his support to the Occupy Wall Street movement with a visit to Zuccotti Park.

Father Berrigan was born in Virginia, Minnesota, in 1921, and entered into the Society of Jesus directly out of high school in 1939. He was ordained in 1952.

In addition to his activism, Father Berrigan was lauded for his writing. His first poem appeared in America Magazine in 1942 while he was a student at the Jesuit seminary St. Andrew-on-Hudson. His first book of poetry, Time Without Number, (The MacMillon Company, 1953), won the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1957. In all, he wrote more than 50 books and various articles and commentaries.

At the request of Father McShane, in 2006 Father Berrigan penned Ordina questo amore, O tu che m’ami: Recitative for Four Voices; Ignatius, Francis Xavier, Peter Faber and Chorus, timed for the Jesuit Jubilee Year. The 2007 performance piece, which was was set to music by  composer Elizabeth Swados, celebrated the genesis of the Society of Jesus, which was founded in 1541 by St. Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier and Peter Faber.

Robin Andersen, PhD, professor of communications and former head of Fordham’s peace and justice studies program, said Father Berrigan ran seminars for Fordham faculty on how to teach peace, and also taught courses for students such as Poems by Poets in Torment.

She said that he provided great comfort to students whose faith in peace was shaken by the events of 9/11.

“There were calls to bomb Afghanistan, and I remember one of his students asked him, ‘How can you still have a peace attitude after this?’ Father Berrigan told him ‘Well you know, being a peace activist between wars is kind of like being a vegetarian between meals,’” Andersen recalled.

His writing and activism occasionally intersected, as in The Dark Night of Resistance (Doubleday & Company, 1971), which he wrote in 1970 while he was in hiding from the FBI on federal charges.

In interviews, Father Berrigan credited Dorothy Day with piquing his initial interest in antiwar activism. He said, while he was teaching at Brooklyn Preparatory School, Day had sent a student pacifist to him who sought instruction in the Catholic faith and peace. The musings of John Cuthbert Ford, S.J. on the morality of saturation bombing—such as the firebombing of Dresden in World War II—further convinced him to oppose war.

In a 2012 interview for Faith, Resistance, and the Future: Daniel Berrigan’s Challenge to Catholic Social Thought (Fordham University Press 2012), Father Berrigan was asked to reflect on how things had changed in the 44 years since his arrest for the Catonsville event.

“The mass[es]of our people are victimized by politics and by the media,” Father Berrigan wrote. “We are called to be sensible and realistic about the state of our world without being completely absorbed into it, so that we have nothing to say about it, nothing to do about it.”

“I think, if we stop with just the analysis of how bad things are, we miss the point of the Gospel, which is saying to us in various ways [and]in all sorts of ways what is to be done.

“One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the U.S. around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better.”

The wake and funeral arrangements for Father Berrigan are as follows:
Thursday, May 5:
2-5 pm and 7-9 pm, Wake
Church of St Francis Xavier
46 W. 16th St., New York, NY
Friday, May 6:
7:30 am, Peace Witness and March to Xavier. Assemble at Mary House, 55 East Third St, New York NY
Mass at 10 am
Church of St Francis Xavier, 46 W. 16th St., New York, NY

Donations in his memory may be made to the Fr. Daniel Berrigan, SJ Fund for Social Ministries, Jesuits USA Northeast Province at sjnen.org/donate. The Province has also has created a memorial Peacemaking Fund, which will directly support peacemaking efforts at a wide range of Jesuit works along the entire eastern United States.

Fordham University mourns the passing of Frank G. M. Corbin, FCRH ’50, of Pelham, New York, a public relations professional and adjunct professor who was a beloved mainstay of Fordham’s communications faculty for 59 years. He died on Oct. 17 at the age of 90.

“We’ve lost someone who was very near and dear to the department, and to Fordham,” said Lance Strate, PhD, one of many professors in the Department of Communication and Media Studies who knew him. “He was a consummate professional in public relations and as a teacher. He was really a very kind and considerate person who was always interested in finding the common ground with the person he was interacting with.”

Corbin, owner of Corbin Communications Counsel in Pelham, was a 1943 graduate of Cardinal Hayes High School and a veteran of World War II and the Battle of the Bulge. He also belonged to the group of Fordham alumni that honored their former professor, Edward A. Walsh, by creating a scholarship and a media laboratory—located on the Rose Hill campus—in his name, Strate said. Corbin sat on the committee that chose the Walsh Scholarship recipients.

“He never wavered in his loyalty to Fordham and never stopped giving back for as long as he was able to,” Strate said.

While his career was successful, teaching at Fordham was “his true passion,” according to Corbin’s obituary. For decades, ending in 2012, he taught a popular course in public relations that he was clearly proud of, colleagues said. “I don’t think I’ve ever known a human being who loved teaching as much as Frank Corbin,” said communications professor Paul Levinson, PhD. “He loved being part of the academic world, and he loved being part of Fordham.”

Corbin emphasized ethics in the course, said another colleague, communications professor Robin Andersen, PhD. He was a longtime reader of The Catholic Worker who embraced Fordham’s ethos of social justice, as well as its philosophy of cura personalis, which was invoked at his funeral on Oct. 20, she said.

“Fordham and its mission really defined Frank,” Andersen said.

Corbin’s family asked for donations in lieu of flowers to be sent to the Frank G. M. Corbin Scholarship Fund, Fordham University Development Department, c/o Michael Boyd, Rose Hill Campus, Bronx, N.Y., 10458. Gifts may also be made online.

“His strength was unwavering, his intellect was rigorous, and his selfless nature was to be admired,” his obituary said. “He was well loved, respected, and will be missed by all who knew him.”

Corbin is survived by his two children, Catherine and Peter; his daughter-in-law, Annette; and his two grandchildren, Kaitlyn and Caroline.

There was the Yahoo story that captioned similar photos but identified a black victim as “looting” food and a white victim as “finding” food. There was the opinion column by The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd citing the city as “a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs.”

Andersen, professor of communication and media studies, knew something was not right with the reporting.

“Katrina was an extreme example of the media’s disaster myth coverage,” she said. “News outlets and police reports were focused on looting, rape, and themes of anarchy and chaos—all described with terrible vituperative language and portraying residents and victims as deviants and criminals. That was never true.”

A decade later, the exaggerated and often unfounded misreporting has been exposed thanks to multiple efforts, said Andersen. She points especially to Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke, the work of investigative journalist A.C. Thompson exposing the cover-up of a man shot by police, and an HBO show called Treme.

Examining Katrina Coverage

A new book by Andersen, to be published next year by Lexington Press, examines Treme as a critique of previous media narratives, through offering portrayals of the disaster through the eyes of its victims. The book focuses on how the show helped the full story of post-Katrina rise to the surface.

“Not many television programs can justify an entire book, but this one can,” said Andersen of the show, which is named for the New Orleans sixth-ward neighborhood that saw flooding and widespread damage. “With its diverse cast, Treme disrupts, undermines, debunks and transforms the disaster narrative of post-Katrina New Orleans.”

The show ran from 2010 to 2013 on HBO, following the lives of several post-Katrina New Orleans residents. It is the story of how the flooding devastated family and professional relationships, businesses, and emotional and physical health, and yet, how tradition and culture revived even the hardest-hit.

Andersen first heard about Treme through a lawyer friend working with Katrina victims on recovering paperwork on home ownership and other possessions to qualify for grant funding. The show was produced by David Simon and Eric Overmyer, the team behind HBO’s extremely realistic series, The Wire. In following the formula of their earlier production, they filmed Treme onsite and authenticated the experiences and culture of the inhabitants through music, food, and use of non-actor-locals as characters in the series.

One “strong redress” of initial media coverage, said Andersen, is when the character Creighton Bernette (a writer and professor played by John Goodman) throws a newscaster’s microphone into the river after listening to the reporter tell an international audience that the city is too ramshackle to rebuild. Another, in season three, is the discovery of a police murder and cover-up by investigative reporter L.P. Everett (played by Chris Coy and based on the real-life murder of Henry Glover).

“The show clearly wanted to set the record straight about the news coverage,” said Andersen. “They turn the disaster myth—in which the victims were criminalized—on its head.”

Humanizing Victims

Hurricane Katrina remains one of the century’s most devastating disasters. Approximately 1,800 people died and 182,000 homes were severely damaged when nearly 80 percent of New Orleans was flooded and rescue operations were slow and botched for weeks.

Treme, said Andersen, is an example of how a media-constructed crisis narrative can affect the nation’s ability to plan for future disasters.

It’s terrific television,” she said. “You go from a disaster myth coverage to a human perspective, told through the eyes of the victims of the storm. This allows the public to empathize, to feel compassion for the people on the ground, to say ‘If I were in that situation, I would feel that same way.’”

It is critical to tell the stories of disasters from the human perspective, said Andersen. Any humanitarian crisis needs support from a national and a global public, and the amount of that support is often determined based on the public’s ability to empathize with the victims.

“That is what Treme does—move the narrative from dehumanization of the victims to humanization,” said Andersen. “This may well be the program’s most important legacy and greatest cultural significance.”

— Janet Sassi

On Thursday, April 28 the University welcomed 78 children of Fordham families for its annual Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work day, sponsored by the Fordham University Association.

Each of the Rose Hill and Lincoln Center campuses hosted an all-day curriculum for children aged 8 through 17. At Lincoln Center, students Skye Azhar, top, grandson of Margaret Cluskey (Department of English), followed by Ariana Pertuz, daughter of Sofia Pertuz (Office of Multi-Cultural Affairs) got a lesson in Tae-Kwon Do from Rose Hill senior and blackbelt Gurpreet Parmar.

Other events included a discussion on Eco-Tourism by Robin Andersen, Ph.D., professor of communication and media studies, workshops in dance and landscaping, and a Darkroom Demo by artist-in-residence Joseph Lawton.

—Janet Sassi

Increasing concern for the environment has led to a new way for people to experience the natural world. Ecotourism, also known as sustainable travel or green travel, is becoming one of the largest global industries.

That’s a good thing, right?

Not entirely, said Robin Andersen, Ph.D., professor of communication and media studies.

Andersen is studying how ecotourism is promoted—especially with regard to conservation efforts, biodiversity and wildlife management. Eventually, she hopes to design informational materials that will increase tourists’ involvement in wildlife conservation efforts.

“Let’s figure out a way to change attitudes and behaviors so that tourists really want to preserve the environment or save animals,” Andersen said, “not just go and have a thrill ride into the animals’ habitats.”

Although ecotourism affords tourists the opportunity to travel to pristine and natural environments, and often encounter wildlife, it isn’t always socially and environmentally responsible.

“Most wildlife tourism is unregulated and unmonitored. Most tour operators are not wildlife or habitat specialists and most tourists don’t know the impact of their wildlife encounters,” Andersen said.

Take, for instance, an experience that allows travelers to swim with dolphins, an attraction that is popular at many vacation destinations around the world. Tourists are boated to an area of ocean where food is used to lure the marine mammals to the surface. This regular feeding by humans changes natural behaviors and leads to habituation, leaving the animals more vulnerable to other human activities such as fishing and boating.

Andersen also participated in an excursion in Cuba and found several issues: The animals were removed from their pods and placed in an open-sea facility.

“They’ve got the dolphins in this nice facility out in the ocean, but [tour operators]don’t give tourists any conservation information to help them understand the animals and their habitat, or the dangers posed to dolphins and turtles when they get caught by those huge factory trollers.”

Even if tour operators are well versed in the biology of a dolphin, language is often a barrier.

Moreover, on the excursion in which Andersen participated, roughly 14 tourists were interacting with two dolphins at any given time. The animals worked hard that day, often towing often two adults at a time.

There are several reasons tourism to wild places is growing in popularity. Humans are increasingly living in urbanized and non-natural settings. Factors such as increased airline routes, cheaper airfare and the popularity of nature and wildlife television shows are boosting people’s desire to encounter wild animals in their natural settings.

Through her research, Andersen developed models to describe why tourists seek such excursions.

In the “edutainment” model, tourists seek recreation, fun and entertainment with some information. In the extreme action model, they seek danger and an adrenaline rush at the expense of wildlife, such as alligator farms, or as in Baja California, from speeding past sea lion colonies in banana boats. There is also the snorkel/dive model and healing/therapy model, both of which could use animal encounters more effectively to inspire tourists to become more knowledgeable about animals and their habitats.

So are there any positive ecotourism models?

Andersen found excellent examples in Central America, such as the Community Baboon Sanctuary in Belize. There, wildlife is encountered in the context of conservation and community development. Also, education about the species and threats to the animals are conveyed to tourists. More importantly, the local community is involved, she said.

“A private conservationist came in and asked local farmers who were cutting down trees to leave some trees up so that howler monkeys have a habitat,” Andersen said. “It worked. So now the locals have created more sustainable agricultural practices, the howler monkeys have a habitat and tourists can come in and enjoy all of it while leaving it intact. Everyone wins. It’s a great “best practices” model.”

The popularity of ecotourism led to the creation of the Partnership for Global Sustainable Tourism Criteria (GSTC), a coalition of 32 organizations that foster better understanding of sustainable tourism practices.

In 2008, GSTC devised criteria for what qualifies as responsible ecotourism: If a tourism locale or operator demonstrates effective sustainability planning; maximizes social and economic benefits for the local community; enhances cultural heritage; and reduces negative impact on the environment, it fits the bill.

Not so fast, according to Andersen.

“They completely left out almost anything having to do with wildlife,” said Andersen, who is drafting a report to GSTC. “Our work is cut out for us. It’s a wide- open field. It’s really great that they are trying to coordinate this globally, but they should include a component about wildlife.”